970. Emergence, 8
(Rose)
It feels like visiting a very foreign country.
I’ve never been in so busy a city, since my faint memories from the original Rosemary visiting London.
The closer I get to the heart of the hive construction and tower, the more bubbly and bustling with activity it is.
Only these are all alien looking creatures to me instead of humanity.
These giant and rudimentary bugs don’t wear clothes, not that they would need to. They communicate apparently with some series of taps over their chest or head. Morse code so in a way. No sight generally, nor smell apparently.
They don’t need oversized mammal brains for what they are.
I see what need they answered. The minimum of biology required to reach some mechanical autonomy.
Some probably smell things in this array of monsters, but they don’t globally communicate with it.
Again I see the marks of stingy pragmatism there. Of choices she made out of necessity and need.
For a place where it was pointless to work with smells and efficient to work with compressive vibrations on contact.
Some of the drones are really more bug looking, with more articulations to move around more firmly and accurately.
I see these kind of giant wasps without wings acting as feeders and overseers.
They go around, tapping the drones to check on them, and feeding them mouth to mouth if needed. It looks more like plugging something and fuelling reservoirs than feeding.
They tap each other’s body or head, and they continue on their way.
One of these wasps as big as me came close to me, unsure of what I was.
I was a moving thing along every other. So it checked. It poked my head the same way, with the same sequence.
I gave no reply though. I’m looking for their leader but don’t know how to ask that, so I continued along my way without answering. The automated monster, somewhere between animal, insect and robot, rapidly lost interest in me.
It resumed with the next one after me in the line of the moving swarm.
The closer I get to the tower’s nearby foot, the more I realise it’s not completely built yet. Most of the architecture is complete, but they are adding some reinforcement fibres. Probably to counter the growing weight of the cargo in the spaceship up there?
The architecture of the wall I get closer to is of cables and honeycomb arrays, with alloys of ceramics varying in kinds and tiling every other way. It’s a glittery and softly curved textile looking building. I get that it’s not wrapped in these textiles, but fully made of them, using some fibrous mechanics for the whole thing and its scale.
I don’t recognize the architecture process from anywhere I’ve been, nor the artificial materials used, some of which are shining.
And above all else, much to my surprise still, I detect no significant use of ambient T.I. anywhere around here.
There had been a turmoil for a while, somewhat perceptible from a distance, but not much anymore.
Did she capture someone else with the power of a daiûa? Or simply some artefacts that fall the Earth like meteors in the past?
For now I make my way through this gigantic city hive. I visit it like a very alien country, on my necessary way to reason with its leader ruling somewhere.
~
Near the feet of the tower are the heavy industries. The real hive is there, not in the sky scrapping tower that is clearly their purpose to build.
The factories I reach are organised around deep digs going down into the ground. Wide drill holes, maybe twenty metres in diameter, and going as deep as I could see.
Some pipes go straight down to this mineral hell. Some skeletal frame goes down in helix along, holding the wall as it dives deep there.
Is it to gather heat from the ground down there? I think it might be.
And these handful of deep digs gave the core amount of minerals to build that giant ziggurat of a tower above.
Some different insect looking constructs are going up and down along the pipes of this dig. They are carrying rocks up.
Endlessly. A real hive...
I don’t recognize my dear sister whom loved to do everything on her own to make a metabolism work in details, and letting life complement the gaps on its own...
I reach easily the main factory on this side of the tower. I still haven’t been bothered by any enforcer or soldier. At most I’ve been shoved by blind automatons on their way to work.
I entered the building that has been built with that alien architecture that hates straight lines and corners.
As I expected in this round soufflé cake looking building, there’s a collection of furnaces where minerals are burnt to melting points. I don’t go deep into the inner pores, where air is unbreathable.
But here the tougher pill bugs and crabs with refractory scales and pincers manufacture the pieces required elsewhere.
Some of the furnaces are pools where as I sadly expected, the dead drones are unceremoniously thrown to melt, without any honour. Dogs just come to drop the dead bodies they dragged this far. They melt.
And a little later down there, new ingots are roughly forged.
Other bugs carry them elsewhere outside. I can guess what I will find there in that other industry. Gelatinous eggs, like larvae, to which the artificial limbs will be assembled, until they merge into one another into the next drone.
They don’t grow, they are designed and manufactured, but they are bugs nonetheless. It’s very unsettling to me. Despite feeling nervous, I look further.
~
The biological factory is about as what I expected. It’s not a queen bee laying eggs, but another artificial construct, working as a biochemical factory, cared for by other specific drones.
They are all a somewhat unified species, germinating from the same eggs. Maybe hormonal balances change their prime abilities and orders, but mostly it’s what their body will be assembled toward that will set their caste.
And to seed them, instead of a queen’s abdomen laying eggs, it’s a wide bulb similarly hybridized with mechanical parts. It’s well cared for by many other bugs. It’s an organic reactor which acts as an artificial fertile placenta and multiplying bulbs of embryos. I see what looks like grapes inside.
Some insects are processing food from elsewhere, feeding each other in an externalised digestive system, before feeding the nectar to that warm biological machine. As if the queen’s purpose had been decomposed in a handful different jobs and machines therefore.
This main pouch of water duplicates its essential stem cells endlessly. That is its only job. Like fruits, cells duplications through endless mitosis continues.
When the amounts are high enough, droplets separate from the main stem of what looks like frog eggs. They fall toward a valve where they are swallowed gently by other insects who externalise the next part of the process.
The egg or larva making occurs inside these things I’d call nymphs. They are well cared as well by others along this hive.
They later lay a few little translucent slugs in a gelatine membrane, that are the newborn nervous systems of the upcoming bugs. The little slugs are carried away immediately to the assembly lines in the next rooms, where their newly made exoskeleton and body await. The slug looking larvae are naturally stretching into the offered limbs, fusing with them in a matter of minutes. The new machines are made according to the needs...
And soon enough they stand, and they move for their first meal and then know their mission.
It’s to me altogether horribly gruesome and astonishingly well designed. I’m nauseous and in awe. She seems to have thought of everything.
To make this artificial society of mechanised insects working for her.
They are efficient enough to be autonomous for a cost effective duration, self-sustainable as a whole superorganism and industrious enough to have rapidly erected her monumental tower as they were designed for.
The head inspector or white collars of these factories are nowhere to be found however. They are that good they don’t need them. She made them so well, she didn’t need to be there at all...
So I leave this sanctum of work beyond the concept of life and head toward the roads that will be climbing the tower.
Maybe the architect is nearer to the ship they are filling. And if captured people are there, loaded already...I will see.
Down there, as much as I hated everything I’ve witnessed, as much as I’m emotionally or intellectually conflicted; I don’t think I’ve witnessed ethical dismay.
Perhaps, hopefully, she still thinks a little humanely.
~
